1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.
2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?
3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
justanotherbody 7 hours ago [-]
1 - based off of my experiences both using and maintaining various infra at the University of Washington the problem is not finding talent to write software, it's the part that comes after. Maintenance, updates, et al.
A common theme is limited or no budget for updating or expanding systems such that the go from "nice" to "acceptable" to "clunky" and then worse.
Politics also becomes an issue. That aged home rolled service might have a palpable price tag to fund a major update for, but once you do discovery and scope every specialized integration made for every department and reality sets in. Whatever path is chosen is going to burn a number of parties, and using a vendor provides a baseline for functionality and a convenient scapegoat
2 - see federated auth via shibboleth, or any number of incommon tech. Or even Kerberos
This stuff exists and often works well, but brings it's own operational maintenance challenges and required specialized skill sets.
3 - only a subset of these processes were handled on paper. expectations on both the timelines and breadth of services have gone up significantly since this was all on paper
basket_horse 10 hours ago [-]
It’s not rocket science, but you’re vastly underestimating what it takes to run a modern university. Not to mention things like security and support, which a university is not setup well to handle in house. The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software.
karencarits 8 hours ago [-]
> The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software
I guess we could also flip it and ask why don't we offer PhDs in developing software for public administration?
basket_horse 6 hours ago [-]
It’s engineering, not research
andrewbutts 41 minutes ago [-]
PhD in engineering is a thing
browningstreet 3 hours ago [-]
I went to an Arizona university in the 90s and our class registration system was far more customizable and feature-ful than what my son lives with now. His university has half the students mine did and they, across two decades, shared a university president.
I think it might also be something else.
natas 10 hours ago [-]
1) Because Leadership knows they don't have the competency to manage a project of this size, universities have become expensive adult daycares.
2) See (1) and also because AI can't do it, so they can't handle.
3) Because paper kills trees, and brawndo contains electrolytes, duh.
wongarsu 10 hours ago [-]
To quote the university's website:
> Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects, and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business environments
Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or make it a student-run program, but surely something can be arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the Information Systems Management courses
pknomad 10 hours ago [-]
I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this area:
1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.
2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)
Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.
3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.
For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
cootsnuck 9 hours ago [-]
> For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.
Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are specifically talking about places with the highest cost of living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over $200K.
pknomad 5 hours ago [-]
I am saying that. Salary + taxes + insurance + retirement + other benefits + support cost is around 670k. Salary eats up like 160k of that budget, though.
robwwilliams 3 hours ago [-]
Please provide a breakdown.
I find this 4X of base salary implausibly high. 2X strikes me as closer to my reality at a large academic medical center.
Newlaptop 3 hours ago [-]
Payroll taxes on $160k salary are $12,240. Employer contribution to health insurance is maybe $6k - $20k. Retirement maybe $5k. Still under $200k.
Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k
cyberrock 5 hours ago [-]
#1 has to be thought through carefully because ultimately this would involve students being able to access other students' information. It only takes one instance of stalking, harassment, etc. for it to blow up.
DontchaKnowit 4 hours ago [-]
Theres all kinds of situations wjere students have access to other students personal info in a professional capacity. It is handled like any other situation where this is the case
lotsofpulp 9 hours ago [-]
> At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
Federal taxpayers underwrite unlimited amounts of money to the university’s customers. Why would the university’s leaders not take advantage of this and enlarge their kingdoms as much as possible? The bigger the budget, the bigger the university employees’ cut (incl the board).
Spivak 10 hours ago [-]
Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned university employees could do any worse.
I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the administration.
colechristensen 10 hours ago [-]
A LOT of major software was written in universities, plenty of the foundational technologies of the Internet included.
msy 10 hours ago [-]
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
basket_horse 10 hours ago [-]
These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
msy 7 hours ago [-]
So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.
basket_horse 6 hours ago [-]
I empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.
rwmj 10 hours ago [-]
ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
rgovostes 9 hours ago [-]
I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.
I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)
They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
heyheyhey 5 hours ago [-]
> my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding.
Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers.
I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customizations.
rgovostes 4 hours ago [-]
Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?
heyheyhey 3 hours ago [-]
You don't develop it, you develop on it. SN provides the underlying software, implementations, hosting, upgrades, etc. Salesforce is another example of this.
inkyoto 1 hours ago [-]
ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), not a SaaS, that allows development of new products on top of it.
At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.
We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.
rwmj 9 hours ago [-]
Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?
rgovostes 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying:
> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah
Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.
dwood_dev 6 hours ago [-]
F500, we have a pretty custom ServiceNow, but all I do is put the ticket or any other identifier in the search box and go. Takes 2 seconds to be in the ticket. Granted, that interface sucks too, but I suspect your main problem is internal to your org and the people that configured your ServiceNow.
janstice 8 hours ago [-]
Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.
We have something called ServiceNow where I work. It's so horrible that I assumed it was in house.
drjasonharrison 5 hours ago [-]
I, too, made this assumption. Then I learned it was an actual product my ex-employer had selected and kept using.
It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.
skissane 9 hours ago [-]
> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?
When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
FireBeyond 5 hours ago [-]
I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.
Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.
Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.
What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.
johnboiles 10 hours ago [-]
How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again.
It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
Etheryte 9 hours ago [-]
My guess is that it's the IBM or React of HR. Everyone knows it, everyone knows how to use it.
alephnerd 10 hours ago [-]
> It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though
Data Integration.
Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them.
A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc.
All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening.
That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
kotaKat 9 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised to see them on a patchwork of applications still and not already on an enterprise-wide system like Ellucian Banner. I wasn't expecting Workday here, though.
That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as an employee in this nonsense it feels like?
janstice 8 hours ago [-]
Workday’s student offering is designed as a full student management offering like Banner et al, with the carrot that it’s internally integrated into the financial & HR systems, which avoids another vendor and also a massive and ongoing finger pointing exercise.
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
herewulf 2 hours ago [-]
Banner is just a pile of hacks on top of an Oracle ERP with 7 character names for everything in the core. At least that was the state of affairs as of a number of years ago.
drjasonharrison 5 hours ago [-]
Its page load time is as if it's running to the first clouds...
zephyreon 9 hours ago [-]
I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster.
Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.
It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
natas 9 hours ago [-]
infinite money glitch!
russfink 10 hours ago [-]
Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.
bc569a80a344f9c 10 hours ago [-]
“Just let students vibe code your ERP” is a hell of a take.
msy 7 hours ago [-]
What do you think the consultants are doing? They're mostly last year's graduates anyway.
rasz 5 hours ago [-]
Admitting "Our students cant design or code" is also pretty wild.
Spivak 10 hours ago [-]
Is it any worse than an army of consultants? It would be one thing if it was some off the shelf software but a huge chunk of this project seems to be a new custom application intended for student and faculty use.
It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
refulgentis 5 hours ago [-]
If you’re going to open with “is having cs students hack their way to a solution via AI actually worse than Workday?”, this isn’t a fair discussion for who you’re replying to. I assume you’re young and well-intentioned. I would have said the same thing when I was young. The problem is that approach leaves you with, best case with overworked students looking for glory instead of pay, failing classes and enjoy hacking, ~80% of the work done and no staff for maintenance. This isnt an
opportunity for hero hacker story, its a real business, it affect people’s lives at their most vulnerable (higher education, paid education, hospital system)
nutjob2 10 hours ago [-]
What you describe is possibly the one thing that would be worse than implementing Workday.
With that amount of money I’d suspect corruption unless explicitly proved otherwise.
jonplackett 9 hours ago [-]
Was wondering how Workday a managed to sponsor so much stuff
Esophagus4 9 hours ago [-]
I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship.
Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.
The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
wmf 9 hours ago [-]
Nah, it's a horrible job. They box you in so that there is no acceptable solution then blame you for not fixing it.
Esophagus4 9 hours ago [-]
Bummer McBummertown. That seems less fun.
arionmiles 10 hours ago [-]
I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with.
- The UI is slow as hell.
- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.
- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.
Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
natas 10 hours ago [-]
workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.
rwmj 10 hours ago [-]
You had a lucky escape! Workday may be the worst software I've ever been forced to use.
johnboiles 10 hours ago [-]
Can confirm. It's like they actively try to make it terrible.
qmr 9 hours ago [-]
You might want to share with the class?
seattle_spring 26 minutes ago [-]
Maybe Rippling?
bc569a80a344f9c 10 hours ago [-]
Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into?
I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.
Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.
rwmj 10 hours ago [-]
They've (so far) spent $7,600 per staff member. They could have employed an actual person to sit besides each group of, say, 10 staff to deal with their ERP needs in person.
bobthepanda 10 hours ago [-]
UW and Washington University are two totally different, unrelated institutions.
natas 10 hours ago [-]
it's in fact $66MM, the $200MM is for the kickbacks.
drjasonharrison 5 hours ago [-]
We call those "change requests"
scuff3d 3 hours ago [-]
Imagine spending that kind of money, and even if everything goes perfectly, your still stuck with fucking Workday at the end.
downrightmike 20 minutes ago [-]
How much do they pay the football coach?
alephnerd 10 hours ago [-]
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.
HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].
I worked for a CRM reseller for a bit when I was younger.
At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity.
So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root where they just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.
Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.
alephnerd 9 hours ago [-]
> Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities
Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.
But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.
> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity
Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.
jasonwatkinspdx 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I had an unexpected insight into all this as growing up, my best friend's dad was a COBOL programmer for Metlife insurance.
The upside of those old mainframe centric systems is they do have impressive reliability. But you increasingly become dependent on just a handful of old souls like my friend's dad that are the only people who understand it in sufficient detail to try to update it.
My friend's dad had good job security but it seemed pretty demoralizing otherwise.
FireBeyond 5 hours ago [-]
What the hell PHI / EHR work is Workday doing?
The answer should be "none".
IshKebab 9 hours ago [-]
Spending $2k/year/student on it sounds pretty insane to me. At that price it would be cheaper just to hire an army of secretaries and do it on paper.
colechristensen 10 hours ago [-]
Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the container that contains it (whatever budget that they can convince people to spend driven by however large an administration the leadership can get away with to justify their salary).
People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
alephnerd 10 hours ago [-]
An organization that houses, feeds, provides community medical care, and hundreds of other services like a private university like WUSTL needs a centralized system for procurement, human resource management, integrating different business units, etc would of course be extremely complex.
Just because YOU don't understand the complexities behind managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k dependents doesn't mean it's any less important.
This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.
msy 7 hours ago [-]
$1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
captainregex 9 hours ago [-]
this is a disgusting amount of money for this
yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
so whats equivalent to a take home interview project due in 7 days takes a university 7 years and $266M
proof we should be getting paid for assessments
Rendered at 07:36:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.
2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?
3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
A common theme is limited or no budget for updating or expanding systems such that the go from "nice" to "acceptable" to "clunky" and then worse.
Politics also becomes an issue. That aged home rolled service might have a palpable price tag to fund a major update for, but once you do discovery and scope every specialized integration made for every department and reality sets in. Whatever path is chosen is going to burn a number of parties, and using a vendor provides a baseline for functionality and a convenient scapegoat
2 - see federated auth via shibboleth, or any number of incommon tech. Or even Kerberos
This stuff exists and often works well, but brings it's own operational maintenance challenges and required specialized skill sets.
3 - only a subset of these processes were handled on paper. expectations on both the timelines and breadth of services have gone up significantly since this was all on paper
I guess we could also flip it and ask why don't we offer PhDs in developing software for public administration?
I think it might also be something else.
2) See (1) and also because AI can't do it, so they can't handle.
3) Because paper kills trees, and brawndo contains electrolytes, duh.
> Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects, and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business environments
Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or make it a student-run program, but surely something can be arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the Information Systems Management courses
1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.
2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)
Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.
3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.
For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.
Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are specifically talking about places with the highest cost of living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over $200K.
I find this 4X of base salary implausibly high. 2X strikes me as closer to my reality at a large academic medical center.
Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k
Federal taxpayers underwrite unlimited amounts of money to the university’s customers. Why would the university’s leaders not take advantage of this and enlarge their kingdoms as much as possible? The bigger the budget, the bigger the university employees’ cut (incl the board).
I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the administration.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)
They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers.
I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customizations.
At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.
We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.
> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah
Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.
It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.
When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.
Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.
What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.
It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
Data Integration.
Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them.
A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc.
All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening.
That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as an employee in this nonsense it feels like?
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.
It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.
The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
- The UI is slow as hell.
- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.
- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.
Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.
Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.
HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].
[0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou...
[1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/
[2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/
At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity.
So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root where they just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.
Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.
Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.
But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.
> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity
Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.
The upside of those old mainframe centric systems is they do have impressive reliability. But you increasingly become dependent on just a handful of old souls like my friend's dad that are the only people who understand it in sufficient detail to try to update it.
My friend's dad had good job security but it seemed pretty demoralizing otherwise.
The answer should be "none".
People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
Just because YOU don't understand the complexities behind managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k dependents doesn't mean it's any less important.
This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.
proof we should be getting paid for assessments